The Countess Conspiracy

It was an oblique message, one he understood all too well.

Don’t ask what I want.

“I take it all back,” Sebastian said. “You’re not difficult.”

She huffed.

“Some people are like a blacksmith’s puzzle—intricate loops of iron fitted together in some convoluted manner. You can play and pry at them over and over, but if you don’t know their secret, you’ll never take them apart. Those people are difficult until you know their secret. Then they’re easy.”

Her nose wrinkled, and she turned to the flower next in line, carefully separating its petals. He wondered, offhand, if she realized how erotic the action was—Violet calmly fertilizing flowers, spreading their petals wide and sliding the pollenated needle in. The analogy made itself. She spent half her life in this clinical, insect-free structure, functioning as both birds and bees. As she leaned over, her hips shifted against her smock.

He could steady her with his hand. One hand, right there on her hip…

He didn’t move.

“I see.” Violet straightened from the task and slipped this needle into the discard bucket with the others. There was a touch of scorn in her voice. “You know the secret of me. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think you have a secret. It’s like you were made by some fiend of a blacksmith. You’re a puzzle without a solution. There is no way to undo you. All I can do is learn to avoid the razors.”

She breathed out slowly and picked up her pen. “Yes,” she said softly. “That’s me. Good for nothing but cutting. Made by an insane blacksmith.”

While she made the notation, he picked up the parchment sack and bagged the flower head. Sometimes, he knew her so well. Compliments made her freeze. Touches—even the lightest, least suggestive of touches—made her back away. But say something like this and she slipped into stony silence. There were no safe paths with Violet, only lions all the way.

“Thank you, Sebastian,” she said. “I shall have warnings embroidered on all my handkerchiefs. ‘Sharp blades ahead. Watch your tongue.’”

“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

She looked up. “No? Then maybe you should listen to your words. ‘Oh, that Violet—never showing any feelings! It’s like she keeps her true self hidden from the entire world.’ Why would that be, do you think?” One hand gravitated to her hip, right where he’d wanted to slide his hand. “You, of all people, should understand. I keep everything hidden because there’s nothing about my true self that anyone likes. I’m not difficult, Sebastian. I’m the easiest person around. I don’t belong, and I spend all my time pretending I do. Sometimes I get weary of it, and that makes me angry.”

Violet sighed, set aside her pen, and turned back to her flower bed. She reached for another gauze-wrapped needle, and then shook her head and turned to him.

“It’s not fair to the people around me when I lose my temper.” Her jaw squared. “I say awful things when I’m angry. But it’s not fair to me, either, that I was made this way. You think it’s hard spending time with me? Imagine being a blacksmith puzzle made by a madman. You’re unable to perform the basic functions of your existence. You never bring anyone joy. You learn not to hope when someone picks you up. Because no matter how high their anticipation runs upon starting, you know what will happen in the end: They’ll throw you away in disgust.”

Disgust. Was that what she thought he’d expressed? “Violet,” he said softly. “I wasn’t—I’m not disgusted by you. That’s the last thing I am.”

She stared straight ahead. “It comes out to the same thing, whatever name you give it.” Her voice was as stiff as her arms at her side. “Don’t worry about your conscience, Sebastian. Everyone tires of me eventually. Lay me aside and walk away.”

He let out a frustrated sigh. “You’re being ridiculous. You’re acting as if there’s nothing to you but your work—as if once I walk away from that, I stop caring for you at all. It doesn’t work like that.”

Her lip twitched in dismay at his words—right on caring for you—and Sebastian sighed and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “There is more to you than your work.”

She turned away. “Do you remember when you first submitted my paper?”

It had been before her husband passed away. She’d written up her work and asked Sebastian for advice—which he’d been unable to deliver at first, as he’d never read a scientific paper, either. They’d studied a number of them together, Violet writing and rewriting until they were both satisfied.

The first time she submitted it to a journal, it had been sent back to her with a note that perhaps a ladies’ journal on home gardening might prefer her modest contribution. The next publication hadn’t bothered to explain its rejection, nor the one after that nor the one after that.

“That’s bollocks,” Sebastian had told her when that last slip had come in the mail. “They aren’t even reading it.”

Violet had been sick at the time. She had never told him what ailed her. He’d only known that she’d become weaker and weaker. Her skin had been like wax, and she’d been given to fainting spells.

She’d refused to talk about that, too.

She’d simply sat in her chair, unable to even stand, and refused to look in his direction. “It must not be very good. Likely they have all sorts of excellent submissions, and this didn’t make the cut.”

“If I were the one submitting—a man with a university education—they’d give it a second look,” Sebastian had said in a fury. “And a third one too, I’d wager.”

So she’d put his name on the paper. “Go ahead and try,” she’d told him.

Sebastian had ridden into Cambridge the next day and handed it to a former professor for advice. The man had read it in stunned silence and then looked at Sebastian. “Malheur,” he’d said in a strangled voice, “this is brilliant.”

Several months later, it had been accepted for publication and Sebastian’s first lecture had been scheduled.

At that lecture, Violet had smiled raptly for the first time in nine months. That smile of hers—the color that had come temporarily to her cheeks—was the only reason he’d agreed to keep doing it.

But she wasn’t smiling any more. She was glaring at the dirt in front of her, and Sebastian wished he could make this right again.